Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.